Computer Science News

Dr Amin Coja-Oghlan, Associate Professor (Reader) in the Department of Computer Science and Warwick Mathematics Instititue, has been awarded the ERC Starting Grant.

ERC Starting Grant is one of the most prestigious grants awarded by the European Research Council for world-class researchers, and Amin is one of the very few researchers in Warwick to receive this grant. His new ERC Starting Grant, worth over a million of euros for the period of five years, has been awarded for his project »Phase Transitions and Computational Complexity«.

Dr Coja-Oghlan's main research area is in the Theoretical Computer Science, with special focus on the study of Algorithms and Complexity via rigorous mathematical methods, on the boundary of computing, combinatorics, and probability. He published pver 30 papers in refereed journals (eight as a sole author) and a similar number of papers in the proceedings of international Computer Science conferences. He is the winner or the EATCS Award for the best paper in Track A at the 36th International Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming (ICALP 2009), and he has been an invited speaker at numerous international conferences in computer science and in mathematics.

We welcomed over 200 visitors to the Department at the Open Day at Warwick on 24th September. There was a full programme of talks, demonstrations and displays with staff, students and alumni also participating. The next University Open Day is on Saturday 12th May 2012. For further details of that, and of Warwick Visits and Campus Tours this term, see

http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/study/undergraduate/visits/opendays/

There is also a Virtual Tour linked from that page. If you are making a Warwick Visit, or an independent visit, and give us advance notice, we shall try and arrange for someone to show you around the Department and have a chat. We can usually do this on a Wednesday or a Friday in the afternoon, but also other times are possible. Please contact Gillian Reeves-Brown on 02476 523193 to make arrangements.

Dr Matthias Englert joined our department as a new Assistant Professor in September 2011.

A short bio:

Matthias received his undergraduate degree in Computer Science at the TU Dortmund and then his PhD in Computer Science in 2008 from the RWTH Aachen University, Germany. In 2008 he won the prestigious EPSRC Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Theoretical Computer Science, hosted by our department in Warwick; title of his project was »Randomisation in Online Algorithms, Load Balancing and other Dynamic Problems«. In September 2008, he joined the Department of Computer Science and DIMAP at the University of Warwick as a Postdoctoral fellow.

His current research interest lies in Theoretical Computer Science, in the area of the analysis of algorithms, more precisely in online algorithms, metric embeddings, load balancing, probabilistic input models, and algorithmic game theory.

For more information please see his page at http://www.dcs.warwick.ac.uk/~englert/ ... or stop by in his office CS2.23.

We're very happy to welcome Matthias in our department!

Dr Sara Kalvala has been awarded a grant towards developing tools for Synthetic Biology. The multidisciplinary project, funded by EPSRC and involving colleagues from Nottingham and Sheffield, aims at developing programmable defensive bacterial coatings and skins.

Scientific and technical advances mean that it is practically feasible to insert external genes into bacteria; the difficulty is in making sure the modified bacteria do something useful. For this, it is useful to approach the cell as a machine and its genetic engine as made up of brick-like components that can be combined in different ways. This is the idea behind the new and exciting discipline of Synthetic Biology.

Sara's experience in compilers and formal logics will inform the development of tools which will help assemble genetic networks and model their interactions with host genes. Then, the whole procedure to perform this genetic engineering in an efficient and robust way will be addressed. Then we will be ready to actually manipulate the bacteria and create useful bacterial coatings and skins.

The project is due to start in early 2012, and research staff will be recruited at all three sites. At Warwick we will be looking for a post-doctoral researcher with expertise in both computer science and biology. For further information please contact Sara Kalvala.

The International Conference on Knowledge and Smart Technologies was held at Burapha University, Thailand on 8th - 10th July. One of the keynote lectures was given by Steve Russ (Knowing and Computing) and the conference was preceded by a day-long workshop on Introduction to Empirical Modelling. The workshop was led by two former PhD students from Warwick Jaratsri Rungrattanaubol and Antony Harfield now both lecturing at Naresuan University, Thailand. The Dean of the Faculty of Informatics at Burapha is Dr Suwanna Rasmequan who also gained her PhD from the Empirical Modelling research group at Warwick.

The main picture shows these three Warwick PhD’s (on the right) with Dr Krisana Chinnasarn (the main conference organiser). Following the conference Steve gave lectures and presentations at Chulalongkorn University, Thammasat University, Sirindhorn Institute of Technology, Naresuan University and the British Chamber of Commerce in Bangkok. A further workshop on Empirical Modelling is planned in Thailand for November 2011.

Computer Science students were presented with their degrees today in Butterworth Hall in the Arts Centre which was preceded by a graduate reception within the department.

Last Tuesday, students studying Computer Science received their results. The Head of Department, Prof. Artur Czumaj, congratulated all CS students on their achievements and handed out departmental prizes. Dr. Irene Glendinning handed out BCS prizes for best projects.

The BCS prizes were given to:

Nicolas Townsend - Best Third year BSc Project
James Michael - Best Third year MEng project

The Department prizes were:

David Beckingsale - Best overall graduating BSc student in Computer Science
Stephen Roberts - Best overall graduating MEng student in Computer Science
Christopher Ball - Third-year Project Prize